For the past few months, in an effort to ensure quality classes, the site has recruited its teachers and given them in-house support to create their classes. On Friday, the company said it had opened up its service so that teachers anywhere can create classes of their own.

“We think there are thousands of things to teach and ways to teach and you’ll never be able to build all the content yourself,” said CEO and founder Justin Kitch. “This is all in the name of helping teachers become entrepreneurs.”

Kitch is hardly a stranger to web services. In the late-1990s he launched Homestead, a web hosting company for small businesses that later sold to Intuit. Just as his earlier company enabled small business owners to a set up shop online, his vision for Curious is to provide “teachers of all stripes” with the tools to build their own online classrooms and reach a wider audience of students.

The site’s lesson-builder software enables teachers to easily create interactive lessons that blend video, text and images, and include multiple choice questions, hints and other engagement features. And the site includes a “teacher’s lounge,” where teachers can access resources on how to shoot and edit video, market and monetize their lessons, and effectively communicate with students.

Curious isn’t the only startup courting lifelong learners with online lessons on topics that tend to run more creative and practical than academic. Companies like CreativeLIVE, Craftsy and Betterfly have popped up in the last few years to target hobbyists and enthusiasts. And some of Curious’ more business-oriented content is similar to that found on lynda.com and other sites with professional development content.

Even its interest in helping teachers elevate their profiles (and beef up their bank accounts) isn’t so unlike that of Udemy and Pluralsight, which say teachers on their platforms have earned six figures or more.

But Curious is trying to carve out a niche for itself as a place for more casual, digestible learning on a broader range of topics, with classes that are between five and 15 minutes long, instead of an hour or more each. Also, Kitch’s background makes it a particularly interesting startup to watch.

The company, which has raised $7.5 million, is currently free but plans to rollout a micropayment system in the future. It currently includes more than 3,000 online lessons in 100 categories.

]]>Over the past three years, General Assembly has opened up campuses and offered classes on technology, business and design in cities around the world, from New York to London to Sydney. Now, the company is upping its efforts to expand in a digital way.

In April, it launched Front Row, a subscription-based online library of classes, including on-demand video and live video streams. On Tuesday, it rolled out Dash, its first interactive online tool, which teaches students how to code.

Plenty of online resources, from Codecademy to Khan Academy, already provide aspiring hackers with interactive programs and video tutorials for learning how to code. But Brad Hargreaves, co-founder and chief product officer for General Assembly, said Dash was first intended to be an onboarding tool for students enrolled in offline web development classes. When the company saw students’ positive response to its project-based approach, he said, they decided to open it up to the public.

The free tool, which it started testing with General Assembly students in April, provides wannabe coders with narrative-based lessons set within the context of various scenarios. For example, learning to build a website involves helping out your friend “Anna,” while creating a small business site is part of getting “Chef Esha’s” new restaurant off the ground.

For now, Dash only offers four projects, but Hargreaves said they plan to “double down” on the site with other web development lessons. And, he added, down the line, the company could potentially build out other interactive learning tools for subjects outside of web development.

“We see a bright future for online education and we see opportunities to build out other topics as well,” he said. “Making Dash available to the general public is part of a larger strategy of broadening our online content to enable students not in range of a General Assembly campus to get additional resources.”

]]>Two months after shutting down an online degree program offered with a non-profit college because of accreditation issues, San Francisco-based startup Altius Education has sold its assets to Datamark, a Utah-based higher education marketing company.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed but, in a statement on what was once Altius Education’s homepage, Datamark said it had acquired Altius’s technology assets, including Helix, the startup’s competency-based online learning platform, as well as its enrollment management and student retention platforms.

Launched in 2009, Altius raised just north of $26 million from investors including Maveron and Spark Capital. Its goal was to partner with traditional higher education institutions to create online degree programs that improved access and personalization.

Through a program launched with Tiffin University, a non-profit college in Ohio, Altius offered an online associate’s degree program that reportedly enrolled 2,000 in 2012. But the initiative, called Ivy Bridge, closed this summer after the program’s regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), ordered them to discontinue classes. Altius has said that in 2010, the accrediting body approved the program through 2020, but after recent changes to its policies, the HLC decided that its business structure did not meet its requirements.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Datamark said it extended offers of employment to 42 of Altius’s employees. Altius’s founder Paul Freedman was not included in the employment offer but will reportedly take a seat on Datamark’s Board of Directors.

As more colleges partner with companies offering paths to online degrees, some have speculated that the demise of Ivy Bridge could have a chilling effect on future online plans. Companies that just give schools a technology platform for offering courses, instead of creating separate online institutions in the way that Altius and Tifflin did with Ivy Bridge, would likely raise fewer questions. But, still, some say schools need more education about what might raise red flags among accreditors.

]]>The hallowed halls of Harvard Business School are about to open up to the world — virtually, at least. The elite institution is reportedly working on an online learning initiative, called HBX, that would mark its first foray into the world of massive open online classes (MOOCs).

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the school has been working on the program at least since June and will likely offer courses through edX, the non-profit online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT. Harvard already offers more than a dozen courses through edX but none are business school classes.

HBS isn’t the first business school to offer a MOOC: Stanford Graduate School of Business is set to launch a course on NovoEd this month, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School offers courses on Coursera and other B-Schools have hopped on the MOOC bandwagon as well. But HBS’ global brand means it will quickly find an eager audience online. As John Fernandes, the chief executive of the business school accreditation group Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, told Bloomberg Businessweek, its decision to offer MOOCs could be a “watershed” moment for the institution.

“They’re going to get high visibility with students all over the world,” he said. “I don’t want to say it’s going to displace face-to-face education, but it’s going to be a big piece of the pie.”

The school has not yet shared which courses it plans to offer, what kinds of costs might be involved or how it plans to make money.

]]>For the past two years, startup Duolingo has helped people learn new languages while crowdsourcing translations of real-world web content. Now, it’s tapping the crowd for new language classes, too.

To date, the company, which has 10 million users, has released mobile and web classes for six languages. But founder and CEO Luis Von Ahn, who also created ReCAPTCHA, said the startup receives about 50 messages a day from users requesting new languages. In total, he estimates users have asked for the addition of classes for hundreds of new languages.

“We simply cannot add so many by ourselves,” he said. “When we get asked for a language, a fraction say I’m willing to help. We took a cue from that and developed a system that lets the community contribute classes.”

Through the startup’s new Language Incubator, users can apply to add a new language to the site. Duolingo reviews the applications to make sure they’re capable of leading the creation of new classes. And, if approved as a moderator, the startup gives them the blueprint it uses when creating new language classes. For example, it shares a list of the 3,000 words that should be covered, key concepts to include and the order in which material should be taught. From there, moderators can recruit others to help with the content creation.

The most-requested languages are Chinese, Japanese Russian and Arabic. But the startup said people can also add fictional languages like Klingon and Elvish.

Many of the moderators will likely be individuals who believe in what Duolingo is doing and want to support it, Von Ahn said. But he added that organizations interested in preserving indigenous or endangered languages have also indicated interest in using the service.

“It’s people who really care about their language and want to help spread it,” he said.

Duolingo, which is the top-ranked education app in both the iOS and Android app stores, has raised more than $18 million from investors including Union Square Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

]]>Online learning sites are popping up across the web, from massive open online course (MOOC) providers like Coursera to the non-profit video-centric community Khan Academy. But New York City-based Socratic believes that even though more teachers are uploading high-quality content to the web and more students are searching for it, they still need a better way of finding each other.

Six months ago, the startup started prototyping its “open platform for students and teachers” and began inviting teachers to the site a few months later. On Tuesday, the young company said it had raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital and including betaworks, Andreessen Horowitz Seed, David Tisch (BoxGroup), John Maloney, and Terrapin Bale.

Co-founder Christopher Pedregal, who previously worked at Google and edtech startup Lore (which was recently acquired by Noodle), said students are increasingly heading to Google to look for answers but often encounter misinformation or inadequate answers.

“There’s a bit of an information retrieval problem. Students aren’t finding the information they need when they need it,” he said “Something is missing from the ecosystem.”

Socratic’s goal is to become an online community – not unlike StackExchange or Github – where teachers upload video lessons and K-12, college and graduate students can find accurate information on every topic they might encounter in school, Pedregal said.

Considering that it’s only a few months old, the site for now includes pages for only two subjects, so they have a ways to go. And it isn’t without competition: sites like Knowmia, TeacherTube and SchoolTube already give teachers and students a place for sharing and viewing educational video. But the company plans to use its new funding – and the guidance of its new investors – to build out the service and bring more teachers into the community. Pedregal also said the site includes crowd-curation tools for quality control.

For now, there are no plans to charge for content on the site. Like online communities Tumblr, Twitter and StackExchange, Pedregal said, they intend to focus first on building their community and monetize later.

Pedregal acknowledged that in edtech, there aren’t yet big success stories for companies that have taken this approach (Edmodo comes close, although it hasn’t yet shared much revenue information). But he said that given the company’s ability to operate outside the restrictions of the school system and the experience of their investors they feel confident that they can make their model work.

“We’re not selling to schools, there’s no need to convince school boards or work with teacher unions,” he said. “We’re a consumer Internet company that’s dealing with educational content.”

]]>Degreed, a San Francisco startup taking on traditional degrees and diplomas with a digital credential that reflects lifelong learning, has recruited its first corporate partner to its corner.

This week the startup said it will launch a partnership with Microsoft Virtual Academy, the tech giant’s online IT training site, which will give students who complete the program’s classes a way to display their achievements on Degreed.

Launched last year, Degreed, which has raised $900,000 in funding and just graduated from Kaplan’s TechStars-powered ed tech accelerator, gives users an online service for tracking all of their learning experiences. It includes traditional educational experiences (from colleges and graduate schools) but also gives people a way to share and “get credit for” learning on Coursera, iTunes and all of the other new educational platforms popping up on the web.

The point, as founder and CEO David Blake has said, is to “jailbreak the degree.” As people increasingly acquire skills through a diversity of online (and offline) experiences, Degreed’s goal is to give users and employers a more modular and digitally-relevant way of understanding a person’s skillset.

For now, the partnership only entails cross-promotion: once students complete a class on Microsoft Virtual Academy, they’re given the option to display their achievement on Degreed. (Degreed said a deeper integration that auto-shares information between the sites is likely forthcoming). But it’s nice validation for the year-old startup and it begins to lay the groundwork for future features that will really show the value of the site.

Helping employers track, quantify employees’ skills

“To date, Degreed [has helped] people measure their academic and lifelong learning. The next big phase for us is to help track professional learning as well and Microsoft Virtual Academy is a really big cornerstone of that,” said Blake.

Since the late 1980s, Microsoft Learning has offered training and certification on Microsoft products and technologies to millions of people around the world. Mark Protus, director of learning programs at Microsoft, said the company’s online academy launched three years ago and attracts about 600,000 users a month with its live and on-demand web classes.

Starting next year, Degreed plans to add features that help users discover courses from a range of online providers that best match their interests and professional goals. For example, for students who have taken preliminary classes in web development, Degreed might recommend more advanced classes on Microsoft Virtual Academy and other sources.

It also plans to pitch enterprises with a service that lets employers manage and track employees’ professional development experiences across a range of sites. Instead of just building a professional development program through a single service (like a Lynda.com or Pluralsight) Degreed would enable employers to cobble together courses and material from a range of online sources and quantify what employees have learned.

In the last year or so, thanks to the rise of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) the conversation around online learning has focused on improving access and quality. But attention is increasingly turning toward the issue of credentialing.

]]>Each month, about six million students head to Khan Academy for online video lectures on everything from chemistry and computer science to logical reasoning and the Renaissance. But could the Silicon Valley-based non-profit someday offer high school diplomas and college degrees in addition to digital content?

For the next two to three years, he said, his non-profit is “heads down focused” on making Khan Academy the best possible learning tool and proving the benefits of personalized, mastery-based learning. But he added that the question gets to something that is “close to [his] heart”: competency-based learning. Now, students make progress based on the amount of time they spend in a seat, not how well they can demonstrate mastery of a skill or concept.

“It really should be, however long you spend in a seat, do you understand calculus now? Do you understand world history now?,” he said on stage. “I don’t know if we’re going to be the actor here – maybe it could happen through the community college system, maybe it could happen through other entities or maybe it’s a combination, [with] employers involved some way. But we are moving to a reality, in five or ten years, where you will have this credentialing architecture that allows someone, regardless of how they learned it … to go and prove in a benchmarked way that they have that skill at a very high level.”

To former Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey, at least, Khan’s comment sounded like a “yes.” On stage at the conference later in the day, Kerrey, who is now a leader of the “online Ivy” Minerva Project,” said he thought that Khan dodged the question.

“He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he didn’t say maybe, meaning he’s probably going to do it, right? I spent 16 years in politics and I heard a “yes,” Kerrey quipped.

New credentialing models gain traction

The idea of a third-party organization, outside of traditional academic circles, offering a new kind of credential is gaining traction. Just yesterday, investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman wrote a post calling for the “disruption of the diploma.” And startups like Degreed and Smarterer, in addition to the non-profit Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative, are beginning to point the way to new models of certification.

Speaking with me after his talk, Khan reiterated his point that, at the moment, his non-profit is focused on the learning experience. But he seemed to leave the door open to some kind of Khan Academy-issued credential in the future.

“At the end of the day, we say that if, in the next five years, we can prove that Khan Academy, especially in conjunction with an amazing teacher, can accelerate a students’ learning dramatically, we’ll have a seat at the table in these other conversations,” he said. “[But] you want to do it right. It has to have the right ingredients, people need to perceive it as something that matters.”

But Khan also emphasized that he thinks new credentials wouldn’t displace the traditional degree: residential colleges offer powerful environments for learning, creating relationships and forming communities; newer certifications can offer professional advancement opportunities in parallel.

“I don’t think it will replace the degree,” he said. “I think it will be a healthy thing for the degree.”

]]>Plenty of startups — from massive open online course (MOOC) providers like Coursera and Udacity to adaptive learning companies like Knewton to the “online Ivy” Minerva Project — want to rethink it means to get an education. But bigwig Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman wants entrepreneurs to go one step further and upend the college degree.

In a post on Linkedin and The New Republic, the prominent investor and LinkedIn co-founder argues that the way to really make higher education more affordable and effective is to reimagine certification.

“To do this, we need to apply new technologies to the primary tool of traditional certification, the diploma,” he wrote. “We need to take what now exists as a dumb, static document and turn it into a richer, updateable, more connected record of a person’s skills, expertise, and experience. And then we need to take that record and make it part of a fully networked certification platform.”

Could a LinkedIn-style profile replace the diploma?

For the majority of employers, a college degree is the baseline requirement. But, Hoffman argued, at a time when the skills the market needs are continuously changing and professional development and lifelong learning options are exploding, that position is becoming sorely outdated.

Given his connection to the world’s biggest professional networking site, it’s not surprising that he wants a LinkedIn-like profile to replace the diploma.

By some estimates, almost half of college students have never used LinkedIn. But last month the company announced a big move to court universities and students as young as 14 years old. And it’s not hard to imagine a world in which kids who were raised on Facebook might take more pride in an online educational and professional profile than a piece of paper that just hangs on a wall.

In his post, Hoffman singled out Mozilla (where he is on the board of directors) as one organization pioneering a new approach to credentialing with its Open Badges initiative. Announced about two years ago and launched earlier this year, the program lets people earn badges for skills acquired on and off the web and then gives them a way to share their achievements on social networks, job portals and other websites.

But Hoffman isn’t the only one thinking up ways to displace the degree and the non-profit Mozilla isn’t the only group that’s made some headway in getting it done. As MOOC providers like Coursera and Udacity attract more students with online courses offered outside the traditional university setting, many thinkers, entrepreneurs and investors have talked of the “unbundling” trend in education. Investor Fred Wilson, for example, has also identified credentialing as an area of interest for his firm Union Square Ventures.

But Degreed, a startup launched by a member of the founding team of ed tech company Zinch (which later sold to IPO-bound textbook rental site Chegg), comes closest to matching Hoffman’s vision of technology-driven credentialing. Its slogan (“jailbreaking the degree”) lines right up with Hoffman’s goal of “disrupting the diploma” and its service is very similar to the design specs he lays out.

The company, which has raised $900,000 in funding and just graduated from Kaplan’s TechStars-powered ed tech accelerator, gives users an online, updateable and machine-readable repository for tracking all of their learning — from a Harvard education to classes on Coursera or iTunes to educational books and videos. It also aims to score those experiences so that users and employers have a modular way of understanding a person’s collection of skills. Since launching last year, the company says, users have uploaded 1.5 million pieces of credentialing information to the site.

As Hoffman noted, a shift to new models of certification is going to take some time. As “dumb” as paper diplomas may be, they have hundreds of years, powerful institutions and entrenched cultural norms on their side. But it looks like momentum is building behind disrupting the degree and it will be interesting to see how active a role LinkedIn plays in their undoing.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Smarterer and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

]]>Back in January, online education startup Coursera launched a new service that it said could be its biggest source of revenue: selling “verified certificates” that authenticate students’ identity and offer a more valuable credential. Now, the company says that Signature Track program has garnered 25,000 signups and earned $1 million in revenue.

Students that sign up for the verified certificates agree to identity validation measures like photo verification and keystroke monitoring. If they successfully complete the course, they receive an electronic certificate from the school offering the class and Coursera. They can also share a detailed record of their performance with others online. (The verified certificate does not mean the student receives credit from the institution.)

Until now, the company, which launched last year, hasn’t released any specific information about how it’s faring on the money-making front. But, in a blog post, it said that reaching the $1 million mark in nine months validates its new certificate as a “brand new currency” for lifelong learning achievement. Logging 25,000 signups out of 4.7 million people who register for Coursera classes obviously isn’t a huge number, but it’s a start and shows that students around the world are willing to pay for the extra credential.

The company said more than 70 percent of the students paying for the verified certificates (which cost between $30 and $100, depending on the class) have a bachelor’s degree or higher and are using them to prove proficiency to an employer or to bolster a resume, cover letter or LinkedIn profile.